A variety of visualization techniques have been developed and are widely used for portraying relational hierarchical data. As an ever increasing amount of hierarchical data is made available from a multitude of distributed databases connected over the internet, a demand for efficient and visually distinctive ways for portraying large hierarchical data sets has developed. Accordingly, what is needed is a display space efficient and visually intuitive computer based method and system for interactively portraying hierarchical data to a user.